Category: Integration Cloud Service

Last week, I had the opportunity to do some work and part of the engagement there was to integrate some data. Easy right? It’s not that hard especially with the technology and standards we have these days. However, what was not apparent upfront until after some digging (ie research), an email and a phone call that there were no APIs to be found. “Ha ha ha … we’ve got you … there is no way you can do it now” So the challenge was accepted and instead of time travelling into the future to find a new way of doing things, I went totally retro. And hence the title “Enter The Robots“. I didn’t go and create new versions of robots or AI. I don’t create a new quantum computing paradigm. What I did do was classically known as screen-scraping. “ick“, I hear from the crowd. “How dare you?“, someone else yells out. But I say this honestly, if there is no other way to integrate and capture data, then I rather do it knowing that it is a last resort.

In this article, I walk through a few of the tips and tricks with what’s currently available to help out in this situation.

Recently, I been part of one POC where I have learned how we can consume Business Events from Oracle Engagement Cloud.

Oracle Engagement Cloud is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering from Oracle which provides unified Sales and Service Capabilities, includes sales force automation to manage the full sales lifecycle including leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities, assets, activities, assessments, and forecasts. Leverage content on mobile, the web, and email applications etc.

Beneath the hood, there are several business object e.g. Account, Contact, Plan, Opportunity, service request etc. which form the data model to store data in back-end and exchange data with other systems.

In this blog, I will be simply demonstrating the prerequisite which are required to configure inside Oracle Engagement Cloud and OIC Sales Cloud Adapter configuration.

Even in a day and age where event-based and real-time data exchange is prevalent and growing, the truth is there are still massive amounts of data exchanged using file transfer mechanisms. Oracle has always played in this realm, but with limited success. The Oracle Managed File Transfer (MFT) application is pretty good, but nothing to write home about… or write a blog about! 😀

One reason is because moving files around and using FTP servers is not very glamorous. Another reason is because the Oracle MFT management dashboard is pretty limited. It is able to monitor various aspects of a file transfer, report success or failure and allow you to resend files. But it has no business context or the ability to understand how a file might be part of a larger business process.

We have covered multiple blogs on how to use Terraform to help automate the provisioning of environments and treat your Infrastructure as Code. Until now, for PaaS stacks, we have used Terraform together with Oracle PaaS Service Manager (PSM) CLI. This gives us great flexibility to script our own tailored PaaS stacks the way we want them. However, with flexibility comes responsibility, and in this case, if we choose to use PSM CLI, it’s up to us to script the whole provisioning/decommission of components that make up the stack. As well as what to do if we encounter an error half-way through, so that we leave things consistently.

A simpler way to provision PaaS stacks is by making use of Oracle Cloud Stack, that treats all components of the stack as a single unit, where all sub-components are provisioned/decommissioned transparently for us. For example, Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) stack, is made of Oracle DB Cloud Service (DBCS), Integration Cloud Service (ICS), Process Cloud Service (PCS), Visual Builder Cloud Service (VBCS), IaaS, storage, network, etc. If we use Oracle Cloud Stack to provision an environment, we only have to pass a YAML template with the configuration of the whole stack and then, Cloud Stack handles the rest. Pretty awesome huh?

Similarly, as we have done in the past, we are going to use a “Build Server”. This will be used as a platform to help us provision our PaaS stacks. When provisioning this “Build Server”, I will add all the tooling it requires as part of its bootstrap process. For this, I am using Vagrant + Terraform, so that I can also treat my “Build Server” as “infrastructure as code” and I can easily get rid of it, after I built my target PaaS stack.

This is a graphical view of what I will be doing in this blog to provision an OIC stack via Cloud Stack:

In a previous blog, I explained how to treat your Infrastructure as Code by using technologies such as Vagrant and Terraform in order to help automate provisioning and decommissioning of environments in the cloud. Then, I evolved those concepts with this other blog, where I explained how to use Oracle PaaS Service Manager (PSM) CLI in order to provision Oracle PaaS Services into the Cloud.

In this blog, I am going to put together both concepts and show how simply you can automate the provisioning of Oracle Integration Cloud with Terraform and PSM CLI together.

To provision a new PaaS environment, I first create a “Build Server” in the cloud or as my boss calls it a “cockpit” that brings all the required bells and whistles (e.g. Terraform, PSM CLI, GIT, etc) to provision PaaS environments. I will add all the tooling it requires as part of its bootstrap process. To create the “Build Server” in the first place, I am using Vagrant + Terraform as well, just because I need a common place to start and these tools highly simplify my life. Also, this way, I can also treat my “Build Server” as “infrastructure as code” and I can easily get rid of it after I built my target PaaS environments and save with that some bucks in the cloud consumption model.

Once I build my “Build Server”, I will then simply git clone a repository that contains my scripts to provision other PaaS environments, setup my environment variables and type “terraform apply”. Yes, as simple as that!

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